English orthography

Diacritics

Some English words can be written with diacritics; these are mostly loanwords, usually from French. As vocabulary becomes naturalised, there is an increasing tendency to omit the accent marks, even in formal writing. For example, rôle and hôtel originally had accents when they were borrowed into English, but now the accents are almost never used. The words were originally considered foreign—and some people considered that English alternatives were preferable—but today their foreign origin is largely forgotten. Words most likely to retain the accent are those atypical of English morphology and therefore still perceived as slightly foreign. For example, café and pâté both have a pronounced final ⟨e⟩, which would otherwise be silent under the normal English pronunciation rules. Moreover, in pâté, the acute accent is helpful to distinguish it from pate.

Further examples of words sometimes retaining diacritics when used in English are: ångström—partly because its symbol is ⟨Å⟩—appliqué, attaché, blasé, bric-à-brac, Brötchen, cliché, crème, crêpe, fiancé(e), flambé, jalapeño, naïve, naïveté, né(e), papier-mâché, passé, piñata, protégé, résumé, risqué, and voilà. Italics, with appropriate accents, are generally applied to foreign terms that are uncommonly used in or have not been assimilated into English: for example, adiós, belles-lettres, crème brûlée, pièce de résistance, raison d'être, and vis-à-vis.

It was formerly common in American English to use a diaeresis to indicate a hiatus, e.g. coöperate, daïs, and reëlect. The New Yorker and Technology Review magazines still use it for this purpose, even as general use became much rarer. Instead, modern orthography generally prefers no mark (cooperate) or a hyphen (co-operate) for a hiatus between two morphemes in a compound word. By contrast, use of diaereses in monomorphemic loanwords such as naïve and Noël remains relatively common.

In poetry and performance arts, accent marks are occasionally used to indicate typically unstressed syllables that should be stressed when read for dramatic or prosodic effect. This is frequently seen with the -ed suffix in archaic and pseudoarchaic writing, e.g. cursèd indicates the ⟨e⟩ should be fully pronounced. The grave being to indicate that an ordinarily silent or elided syllable is pronounced (warnèd, parlìament).

Ligatures

In certain older texts (typically British), the use of the ligatures ⟨æ⟩ and ⟨œ⟩ is common in words such as archæology, diarrhœa, and encyclopædia, all of Latin or Greek origin. Nowadays, the ligatures have been generally replaced by the digraphs ⟨ae⟩ and ⟨oe⟩ (encyclopaedia, diarrhoea) in British English or just ⟨e⟩ (encyclopedia, diarrhea) in American English, though both spell some words with only ⟨e⟩ (economy, ecology) and others with ⟨ae⟩ and ⟨oe⟩ (paean, amoeba, oedipal, Caesar). In some cases, usage may vary; for instance, both encyclopedia and encyclopaedia are current in the UK.

Phonic irregularities

Partly because English has never had any official regulating authority for spelling, such as the Spanish Real Academia Española, the French Académie française, the German Council for German Orthography, the Danish Sprognævn, and the Thai Royal Society, English spelling is considered irregular and complex compared to that of other languages. Although French, Danish, and Thai, among other languages, present a similar degree of difficulty when encoding (writing), English is more difficult when decoding (reading), as there are clearly many more possible pronunciations of a group of letters. For example, in French, (as in "true", but short), can be spelled ⟨ou, ous, out, oux⟩ (ou, nous, tout, choux), but the pronunciation of each of those sequences is always the same. However, in English, while can be spelled in up to 24 different ways, including ⟨oo, u, ui, ue, o, oe, ou, ough, ew⟩ (spook, truth, suit, blues, to, shoe, group, through, crew) (see Sound-to-spelling correspondences below), all of these spellings have other pronunciations as well (e.g., foot, us, build, bluest, so, toe, grout, plough, sew). Thus, in unfamiliar words and proper nouns, the pronunciation of some sequences, ⟨ough⟩ being the prime example, is unpredictable even for educated native speakers.

Spelling irregularities

Attempts to regularize or reform the spelling of English have usually failed. However, Noah Webster promoted more phonetic spellings in the United States, such as flavor for British flavour, fiber for fibre, defense for defence, analyze for analyse, catalog for catalogue, and so forth. These spellings already existed as alternatives, but Webster's dictionaries helped standardize them in the United States. (See American and British English spelling differences for details.)

Besides the quirks the English spelling system has inherited from its past, there are other irregularities in spelling that make it tricky to learn. English contains, depending on dialect, 24–27 consonant phonemes and 13–20 vowels. However, there are only 26 letters in the modern English alphabet, so there is not a one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds. Many sounds are spelled using different letters or multiple letters, and for those words whose pronunciation is predictable from the spelling, the sounds denoted by the letters depend on the surrounding letters. For example, ⟨th⟩ represents two different sounds (the voiced and voiceless dental fricatives) (see Pronunciation of English th), and the voiceless alveolar sibilant can be represented by ⟨s⟩ or ⟨c⟩.

It is, however, not (solely) the shortage of letters which makes English spelling irregular. Its irregularities are caused mainly by the use of many different spellings for some of its sounds, such as and (too, true, shoe, flew, through; sleeve, leave, even, seize, siege; stole, coal, bowl, roll, old, mould), and the use of identical sequences for spelling different sounds (over, oven, move).

Furthermore, English no longer makes any attempt to anglicise the spellings of loanwords, but preserves the foreign spellings, even when they do not follow English spelling conventions like the Polish ⟨cz⟩ in Czech (rather than *Check) or the Norwegian ⟨fj⟩ in fjord (although fiord was formerly the most common spelling). In early Middle English, until roughly 1400, most imports from French were respelled according to English rules (e.g. bataille–battle, bouton–button, but not double, or trouble). Instead of loans being respelled to conform to English spelling standards, sometimes the pronunciation changes as a result of pressure from the spelling, e.g. ski, adopted from Norwegian in the mid-18th century. It used to be pronounced , similar to the Norwegian pronunciation, but the increasing popularity of the sport after the mid-20th century helped the pronunciation replace it.

There was also a period when the spelling of a small number of words was altered to make them conform to their perceived etymological origins. For example, ⟨b⟩ was added to debt (originally dette) to link it to the Latin debitum, and ⟨s⟩ in island to link it to Latin insula instead of its true origin, the Old English word īġland. ⟨p⟩ in ptarmigan has no etymological justification whatsoever, only seeking to show Greek origin despite being a Gaelic word.

The spelling of English continues to evolve. Many loanwords come from languages where the pronunciation of vowels corresponds to the way they were pronounced in Old English, which is similar to the Italian or Spanish pronunciation of the vowels, and is the value the vowel symbols ⟨a, e, i, o, u⟩ have in the International Phonetic Alphabet. As a result, there is a somewhat regular system of pronouncing "foreign" words in English, and some borrowed words have had their spelling changed to conform to this system. For example, Hindu used to be spelled Hindoo, and the name Maria used to be pronounced like the name Mariah, but was changed to conform to this system. This only further complicates the spelling, however. On the one hand, words that retained anglicised spellings may be misread in a hyperforeign way. On the other hand, words that are respelled in a 'foreign' way may be misread as if they are English words, e.g. Muslim was formerly spelled Mooslim because of its original pronunciation.

Commercial advertisers have also had an effect on English spelling. They introduced new or simplified spellings like lite instead of light, thru instead of through, and rucsac instead of rucksack. The spellings of personal names have also been a source of spelling innovations: diminutive versions of women's names that sound the same as men's names have been spelled differently: Nikki and Nicky, Toni and Tony, Jo and Joe. The differentiation in between names that are spelled differently but have the same phonetic sound may come from modernisation or different countries of origin. For example, Isabelle and Isabel sound the same but are spelled differently; these versions are from France and Spain respectively.

As an example of the irregular nature of English spelling, ⟨ou⟩ can be pronounced (depending on vowel mergers) in as many as nine different ways: in out, in soul, in soup, in touch, in could, in four, in journal, in cough, and in famous (See Spelling-to-sound correspondences). In the other direction, can be spelled in at least 18~21 different ways: be (cede), ski (machine), bologna (GA), algae, quay, beach, bee, deceit, people, key, keyed, field (hygiene), amoeba, chamois (GA), dengue (GA), beguine, guyot, and ynambu (See Sound-to-spelling correspondences). (These examples assume a more-or-less standard non-regional British English accent. Other accents will vary.)

Sometimes everyday speakers of English change counterintuitive spellings, with the new spellings usually not judged to be entirely correct. However, such forms may gain acceptance if used enough. An example is the word miniscule, which still competes with its original spelling of minuscule, though this might also be because of analogy with the word mini.

⟨ough⟩ words

The tetragraph ⟨ough⟩ can be pronounced in at least ten different ways, six of which are illustrated in the construct, Though the tough cough and hiccough plough him through, which is quoted by Robert A. Heinlein in The Door into Summer to illustrate the difficulties facing automated speech transcription and reading. Ough itself is a word, an exclamation of disgust similar to ugh, though rarely known or used. The following are typical pronunciations of this string of letters:

• (as in so) in though and dough
• (as in cuff) in tough, rough, enough, and the name Hough
• (as in off) in trough, cough, and Gough
• (as in blue) in through
• (as in saw) in thought, ought, sought, nought, brought, etc.
• (as in comma) in thorough, borough, and names ending in -borough; however, American English pronounces this as
• (as in how) in bough, sough, drought, plough (plow in North America), doughty, and the names Slough and Doughty
• (as in loch; mainly in words of Gaelic origin) in the word lough (an anglicised variant of loch used in Ireland) and in Irish place names, such as Ardclough, Glendalough, Loughmoe, Loughrea, etc.

The following pronunciations are found in uncommon single words:

• hough: (more commonly spelled "hock" now)
• hiccough (a now-uncommon variant of hiccup): as in up
• Oughterard (Irish place name):

The place name Loughborough uses two different pronunciations of ⟨ough⟩: the first ⟨ough⟩ has the sound as in cuff and the second rhymes with thorough.

Spelling-to-sound correspondences

Notes:

• In the tables, the hyphen has two different meanings. A hyphen after the letter indicates that it must be at the beginning of a syllable, e.g., ⟨j⟩- in jumper and ajar. A hyphen before the letter indicates that it cannot be at the beginning of a word, e.g., -⟨ck⟩ in sick and ticket.
• More specific rules take precedence over more general ones, e.g., "⟨c⟩- before ⟨e, i, y⟩" takes precedence over "⟨c⟩".
• Where the letter combination is described as "word-final", inflectional suffixes may be added without changing the pronunciation, e.g., catalogues.
• The dialects used are Received Pronunciation and General American. When pronunciations differ idiosyncratically, a pronunciation that only applies to one of the dialects is noted as being (RP) or (GA). When pronunciations differ systematically in a way that is not accounted for by the diaphonemic transcription system (i.e. the trap-bath and lot-cloth splits), the pronunciations in both dialects are given.
• Isolated foreign borrowings are excluded.
• ∅ means the letter is silent

Consonants

Vowels

In a generative approach to English spelling, Rollings (2004) identifies twenty main orthographic vowels of stressed syllables that are grouped into four main categories: "Lax" (similar to the "short" vowels taught in classrooms), "Tense" (the "long vowels"), "Heavy" (their correlated ⟨r⟩-colored vowel sound), and "Tense-R" (the second and third combined).

For instance, ⟨a⟩ can represent the lax vowel , tense , heavy , or tense-r . Heavy and tense-r vowels are the respective lax and tense counterparts followed by ⟨r⟩.

Tense vowels are distinguished from lax vowels with a "silent" ⟨e⟩ that is added at the end of words. Thus, ⟨a⟩ in hat is lax , but when ⟨e⟩ is added in the word hate ⟨a⟩ is tense . Heavy and tense-r vowels follow a similar pattern, e.g. ⟨ar⟩ in car is heavy , ⟨ar⟩ followed by silent ⟨e⟩ in care is . ⟨u⟩ represents two different vowel patterns, one being , the other . There is no distinction between heavy and tense-r ⟨o⟩, and ⟨u⟩ in the pattern does not have a heavy vowel.

Besides silent ⟨e⟩, another strategy for indicating tense and tense-r vowels is the addition of another orthographic vowel forming a digraph. In this case, the first vowel is usually the main vowel while the second vowel is the "marking" vowel. For example, man has a lax ⟨a⟩ (), but the addition of ⟨i⟩ (as the digraph ⟨ai⟩) in main marks the ⟨a⟩ as tense (). These two strategies produce words that are spelled differently but pronounced identically, which helps differentiate words that would otherwise be homonyms, as in mane (silent ⟨e⟩ strategy), main (digraph strategy) and Maine (both strategies).

Besides the 20 basic vowel spellings, Rollings (2004) has a reduced vowel category (representing the sounds ) and a miscellaneous category (representing the sounds and +V, +V, V+V).

Combinations of vowel letters excluding those followed by ⟨r⟩

To reduce dialectal difficulties, the sound values given here correspond to the conventions at Help:IPA/English. This table includes ⟨h, w, y⟩ when they represent vowel sounds. If no information is given, it is assumed that the vowel is in a stressed syllable.

Deriving the pronunciation of an English word from its spelling requires not only a careful knowledge of the rules given below (many of which are not explicitly known even by native speakers: speakers merely learn the spelling of a word along with its pronunciation) and their many exceptions, but also:

• a knowledge of which syllables are stressed and which are unstressed (not derivable from the spelling: compare hallow and allow)
• which combinations of vowels represent monosyllables and which represent disyllables (ditto: compare waive and naive, creature and creator)

The underscore (_) in a vowel-consonant-⟨e⟩ spelling is the place where the next spelling in a word goes in.

The pronunciation of vowel letters when followed by ⟨r⟩ is covered in a separate table below.

Combinations of vowel letters and ⟨r⟩

Combinations of other consonant and vowel letters

Sound-to-spelling correspondences

The following table shows for each sound the various spelling patterns used to denote it, starting with the prototypical pattern(s) followed by others in alphabetical order. Some of these patterns are very rare or unique (such as ⟨gh⟩ for , ⟨ph⟩ for , ⟨i⟩ for ). An ellipsis (⟨…⟩) stands for an intervening consonant.

Consonants

Arranged in the order of the IPA consonant tables.

Common graphemes

Rarer graphemes

Vowels

Nasal vowels are used by some speakers in words of French origin such as enceinte ().

Vowels followed by ⟨r⟩

History

Inconsistencies between English pronunciation and English spelling have gradually increased ever since the late medieval and early modern period of English's history, with the greatest changes a consequence of English pronunciation naturally diverging across many centuries, while the spelling has remained relatively frozen for the last three or four centuries. Thus, modern English spelling is now only somewhat phonetically representative. There are a number of contributing factors to the difficulty of modern orthography but, most importantly, gradual changes in pronunciation, such as the Great Vowel Shift, which account for a tremendous number of irregularities or conservative English spellings that persist without accurately reflecting the now-current pronunciations. Also, more recent loan words generally carry their original spellings (or spellings that follow transliterations operating according to their own non-English conventions). These loan spellings are thus often not phonetic in English; this includes Romanized words from languages written using non-Roman scripts.

A fairly regular spelling system (originally, the runic alphabet, but later the Latin alphabet) for Old English was swept away by the Norman Conquest in 1066, and the English language as a whole was supplanted in some elite spheres by Norman French for three centuries, eventually emerging with its spelling much influenced by the French writing system (with its Latin letters). English also borrowed massive numbers of words from French during this period, and some kept their French spellings regardless of English pronunciation. The spelling in Middle English texts is very variable, since no standardised spelling existed then, with the same word being spelled in different ways by various authors or even the same author, sometimes even in the same sentence. Instead, spellings at the time were generally meant to more closely resemble the writer's own pronunciation (or accents of the characters they wrote about).

For example, , normally written ⟨u⟩, is spelled with an ⟨o⟩ in come, son, love, etc., due to Norman spelling conventions which prohibited writing ⟨u⟩ before ⟨m, n, v⟩ due to the graphical confusion that would result. (⟨n, u, v⟩ were written identically with two minims in Norman handwriting; ⟨w⟩ was written as two ⟨u⟩ letters; ⟨m⟩ was written with three minims, hence ⟨mm⟩ looked like ⟨vun, nvu, uvu⟩, etc.). Similarly, spelling conventions also prohibited final ⟨v⟩. Hence the identical spellings of the vowel sounds in love and cove are due to ambiguity in the Middle English spelling system, not sound change.

In 1417, Henry V began using English for official correspondence instead of the Latin or French of his predecessors, the latter two languages already having standardised spelling by then. For instance, Latin had one spelling for right (rectus), Old French as used in English law had six, and Middle English had 77. English spelling gradually settled into a standardised form too, though the process took some 500 years.

There was also a series of linguistic sound changes towards the end of the late medieval period, including the Great Vowel Shift, largely responsible for transitioning Middle English into Early Modern English. One such change was the ⟨a⟩ in make, name, and case, for example, changing from a pure vowel to a diphthong. These changes for the most part did not detract from the rule-governed nature of the spelling system; but, in some cases, they introduced confusing inconsistencies, like the well-known example of the many pronunciations of ⟨ough⟩ (tough, through, though, cough, plough, etc.). Most of these changes happened before the arrival of printing in England. However, the arrival of the modern printing press in 1476 in some ways froze phonetic spellings of the time, rather than providing the impetus spelling to realign with ever-changing pronunciations. Furthermore, the press introduced further inconsistencies, partly because of the use of typesetters trained abroad, particularly in the Low Countries. For example, the ⟨h⟩ in ghost was influenced by Flemish, whereas the word was often previously spelled gost. The addition and deletion of a silent e at the ends of words was also sometimes used to make the right-hand margin line up more neatly (though many cases of silent e already existed by this time, having been fully pronounced in earlier varieties of Middle English).

To make matters more complex, literary scholars in the 17th century sometimes added in silent letters to words merely to hearken back to their Latin origins, such as the b in debt and doubt and the p in receipt, which, though never pronounced, were inserted during this period. In other instances, scholars even added letters under the mistaken assumption that they were once pronounced or due to mistaken etymologies (such as the relatively recent l in could, meant to mirror the spellings of would and should).

As literacy rose, and by the time dictionaries were introduced in the mid-17th century, the spelling system of English was starting to stabilise. Occasionally (though rarely), deliberate initiatives in favour of one spelling or another succeeded. In the early 19th century, for instance, American lexicographer Noah Webster, who published children's spelling books and the major American dictionary (Webster's Dictionary), was hugely influential at popularising a small number of spelling conventions that solidified in American English but not British English.

By the 19th century, most words in English had set spellings. Even today, the orthographies of British, American, and other dialects of English align for the most part, differing only in minor (and mutually intelligible) ways. Modern English spelling, with its slightly distinct national variants, spread with the expansion of institutions of public education since the late 19th century, which have rigorously reinforced a sense of "right" and "wrong" spellings.

In The Mill on the Floss (1860), English novelist George Eliot satirised the attitude of the English rural gentry of the 1820s towards orthography:

Mr. Tulliver did not willingly write a letter, and found the relation between spoken and written language, briefly known as spelling, one of the most puzzling things in this puzzling world. Nevertheless, like all fervid writing, the task was done in less time than usual, and if the spelling differed from Mrs. Glegg's,–why, she belonged, like himself, to a generation with whom spelling was a matter of private judgment.